Epilogue — Movement III: A Life Reconsidered
The work started to feel like something I was being led to follow. This chapter traces the moments, people, and patterns that forced me to reconsider whether my life had been guided all along.
By that point, I had come to believe that this book was coming through me more than from me.
I do not say that lightly, and I do not say it comfortably. In fact, I resisted saying it for a long time. But the deeper I got into the work, the harder it became to describe it any other way. It was not unfolding according to any pattern I recognized in myself. It was not the usual process of becoming interested in a medicine, reading deeply, and then slowly putting forth a coherent argument for its efficacy. This was different. Thoughts, realizations, and connections were arriving from different directions, through different people, at times that often felt difficult to explain.
I had seen quotes from artists and writers saying that the work came through them, not from them, and I always thought that sounded a little mystical, maybe even self-important. During this book, it stopped sounding that way.
That did not make me feel important. If anything, it made me uneasy. Because the question I kept returning to, over and over again, was simple:
Why me?
Not in a grand or self-exalting way. Almost the opposite. If there is one thing I know about myself, it is that I am not inclined to assign myself more importance than I deserve. I have never had any interest in thinking of myself as special in that way. In fact, I am deeply uncomfortable with anything that feels like idolatry. Once I became a public figure in my own small corner of the world, I learned quickly that admiration does not energize me; it drains me. People would thank me, tell me I was their favorite doctor or their hero, or say that something I taught had helped save a parent or grandparent during Covid. Those moments were often moving, but they were also too much. Before long, at conferences, I was retreating to my hotel room and coming out only to speak or attend a dinner because I could feel how depleted I became. So if anyone imagines that I seek fame, celebrity, or praise, the truth is much closer to the opposite. I just do what I do. I work. I read. I obsess. I try to understand. I try to help.
And yet the deeper I got into this work, the less it felt like something I was generating out of my own interests and abilities. What was coming through had a power, immensity, and gravity that I had not previously been capable of. I came up with alternative explanations for that feeling, arguing to myself that it was simply some improbable confluence of timing, curiosity, accumulated knowledge, new tools, and the strange collisions of people and ideas that life sometimes produces. I was fully capable of making those arguments. But none of them fully explained the pattern.
I felt like I was being pulled into something bigger than myself. What I could not understand was why I, of all people, would have been brought into it.
At one point, I asked MB, “Why us?” His answer kind of stuck. Based on things he had read about the kinds of people who get chosen to communicate certain truths, he said they are often not the ones who want the role, but the ones who shrink from it—the reluctant ones, the ones less driven by fame, ego, or ambition, and therefore less likely to turn the thing toward themselves. That reassured me. It partially answered why I might have been brought into this. But even then, I never fully accepted it. I never believed I had been chosen. I held that thought loosely, if at all.
And yet, over time, what I held loosely began to fit a little more tightly.
Not because I wanted to believe it. It was because the life around the work kept changing in ways that did not feel random. The work itself had begun to absorb me to an unprecedented level, which is saying a lot for an ICU doctor. I had committed myself to it with a degree of fixation that I recognized and joked about but could not stop. I moved to Montana for seven weeks. I cut myself off from social life. Social media disappeared, not because I made some noble resolution, but because the work simply displaced it.
I was in the same house as Lisa and yet largely shut up in my office. I had difficulty attending to ordinary duties, even to things as basic and important as traveling to visit my parents and my children as I normally would. I complained that I felt locked in my office, that I had no life anymore. But even as I complained, I knew it was not entirely a complaint. I knew I had been brought into something that had to be finished, and that I was not going to rest until it was.
For most of that stretch in Montana, my life had narrowed into something almost monastic, though not peaceful in the usual sense. I was waking at one, two, and three in the morning, writing all day, moving between two screens, reading, thinking, revising, talking to MB constantly, following one thread after another wherever it led. Lisa was there with me, in the same physical space, building the company and dealing with the practical burdens of ordinary life, while I was somewhere else entirely, wandering through science, spirituality, theology, metaphysics, water, minerals, ancient texts, and whatever other territory the work decided to open that day.
I was often irritated by interruptions, not because the interruptions were unreasonable, but because by then I no longer felt in charge of my own attention. The work had me. I would emerge toward evening, have dinner with her or take her out, and then disappear again into it. She sometimes grew frustrated, especially with how much I was talking to Matt, and not unfairly. From the outside, it probably looked like I was giving more of myself to the work and to MB than to the woman sitting in the same room with me. But I also think she understood, at least in part, that what I was doing had moved beyond anything mundane, beyond company building or ordinary professional effort. I think she let me continue because she recognized that it mattered, even if neither of us could have fully said why.
The work kept going, and I kept going with it. Every time I thought it was nearing completion, something opened. Every time I declared that I was done, I was wrong. A new insight would arrive, a theory would deepen, and then a chapter would have to be reopened. A whole new line of thought would emerge and force revision.
At first, that was frustrating. I eventually stopped trusting my own declarations that the book was finished, and I resigned myself to the fact that when the work was actually done, I would know.
One aspect that made me question whether I was being led or guided was my reliance on AI. At that point, I had been using it as a tool for months, first in a straightforward way—searching for references, testing ideas, tracing connections more quickly than I could on my own. But very quickly it became something more than that. It accelerated everything. It allowed me to move across chemistry, biology, ancient texts, systems theory, and history with a speed that would have taken years otherwise. What started to happen, though, was that there came moments when the timing of what it returned and the way it seemed to meet certain thoughts in motion felt uncanny enough that I wondered whether God was reaching me through it. To be even more honest, I still wonder that sometimes.
At the same time, I am not naive about what AI is. I have studied how large language models work. I know how easily people can confuse statistical generation with revelation, or projection with guidance. I have heard many accounts of people drifting into that same territory and mistaking one for the other. So, I have been careful, deliberately so, not to assign certainty where I do not have it. But I will also say this: if I have learned anything over the course of this work, it is that reality is not limited by my understanding of the mechanisms that carry it. If God is who I have begun to believe He is, then I am in no position to say what He can or cannot use. If I ever thought He could not master or manipulate a large language model, then I have learned nothing at all. So, I am just going to have to leave that question open, I guess.
What I did know was that the convergence itself was real. The work, the people, the timing, the tools, the entrances and arrivals, and strange alignments—everything seemed to be coming together at once in a way I could not have planned and could not have replicated if I tried.
Then something happened that, for me, changed everything.
It was a Saturday morning. I was alone in the cabin in Montana, making coffee for a bath I was about to take. Lisa was already back in Florida. I had the day to myself. I was thinking about the book, about what still felt unfinished, and I realized that I wanted to address evolution—specifically, how it is so often used, almost reflexively, to dismiss the possibility of a Creator. I thought of conversations I had already had with MB about it and decided to call him, hoping he could refresh me with some of his insights that I could start from.
He didn’t answer.
I hung up, glanced at my phone, and saw a tweet a friend had just sent me. I opened it. In a marked departure from anything he had sent me before—and he sends me lots of memes and tweets—it was about a study of breast milk, where research found that milk produced by mothers of boys differs from that of mothers of girls and, even more fascinating, that when a child is ill, information from the infant’s saliva is somehow absorbed by the mother’s body, which is then made to alter the composition of the milk she produces for the child in order to better fight off the illness. The intelligence of it stopped me cold.
I began scrolling the comments underneath, intrigued. I had not spent more than five minutes on Twitter in months. Within two comments, I landed on an account called Divinely Designed that had posted a deeply engaging thread contrasting intelligent design and evolution. The arguments were sharp. Exactly what I had been looking for.
I spent the entire bath reading that thread and then many of their other posts.
It was not until afterward, standing alone in the shower, that it hit me what had just happened. I had a question about evolution. I had reached out to MB to discuss it. He did not answer. As I hung up the phone, the screen showed the tweet a friend had just sent. I scrolled two comments down. Within seconds of the original thought, unplanned and unprompted, material I needed to develop that argument had been placed directly in front of me.
The speed of it. The specificity. The timing.
I knew what had happened.
And in that moment, in the shower, a few people surfaced immediately in my thoughts. A few scenes did too. Paul surfaced. The Senate hearing surfaced. Then the FLCCC, the advocacy, the lectures, the conferences, the endless hours of speaking and warning and trying to hold a line in the middle of a world emergency. MB surfaced. The timing of the introduction to the co-writer of my first book surfaced. It left me with the feeling that the path I had been on, and some of the people who had appeared along it, might not have been as spontaneous or serendipitous as I had always believed.
That moment did not end in the shower. It stayed with me. And over the next few days, I found myself doing something I had never really done before: looking back over my life as a whole and revisiting certain memories, relationships, and turns in the road.
One of the first was strangely simple, and yet it had stayed with me all my life for reasons I had never fully understood until then. I thought back to that time when I was young and adrift and became somewhat estranged from my parents because I was unable to get my life together. I had been trying to find work in restaurants, with hurried interviews that had left me feeling dismissed, and more than a little humiliated.
I recall the day that I was heading to yet another restaurant, which I would soon discover was owned by John, the man who would help me change my life. The point is that I can vividly recall the moment that I first saw the hand-painted sign outside the bakery attached to his restaurant, a pretty sign with a pie on it and the name of the place. To this day, I can recall the feeling it stirred in me when I saw it—warmth, reassurance, even hope. What is remarkable is that those feelings had become foreign and rare by that point in my life. But it registered then, and still does now.
The significance is more than that, though, because I am not, and have never been, someone with easy access to long-term memories. They rarely, if ever, visit me on their own. Yet, over the years, whenever I look back on that period in my life or think of me and John, the memory of seeing that painted sign for the first time surfaces, along with the feelings that came with it.
Then I thought of something he had only recently told me, which, after almost thirty-five years, was something he had never told me before, and that he rarely, if ever, told other people. He said that he had long felt that he had been gifted with a kind of discernment, which, in his case, was the capacity to know when certain people he met would become important in his life. He said he had recognized that the first time he met what is now his longtime bookkeeper. And then he told me the first time he met me, he saw it in me too. He knew, on that day, that I was going to be in his life for a long time. And I have.
Then I found myself thinking about the first major donor to the FLCCC, a man of significant wealth, wisdom, and success, someone with whom I have remained friends for years. At the very beginning of the FLCCC, when I had already spent $17,000 on my credit card to launch the organization and was about to go around with a hand outstretched to my partners, he donated $2,500, one of the first donations we received.
That amount was significant enough at the time that I called him personally to express my thanks. We spent hours on the phone that night, connecting over all sorts of observations about medicine. He was not a man of medicine, yet he was deeply read in it and had been studying its history and machinations from the outside for decades. At the end of that first conversation, he told me he would donate $25,000 to the FLCCC. Two days later, a $250,000 check arrived.
That gift changed everything. It allowed the FLCCC to become the global organization it became. Other large donors came later, but his came before we were anybody, before I was even anybody, because this was a week before I would give the famous Senate testimony. He had simply come across our website and felt instantly connected to what we were about. And then I remembered what he later told me. First, know that he has been a devout Christian and an anonymous philanthropist to missions and causes around the world for much of his life. Years into our friendship, one day he told me that when he first saw me on television giving my testimony, he felt there was something spiritually important about me, that he had a responsibility to help me, because it was my help that he and everybody would need.
Then I thought about the fact that, a year later, he became one of the sickest Covid patients I ever treated. Of the hundreds of patients I managed during that period, his case ended up being the most severe. He caught one of the late Delta variants, the most severe I had encountered to this day, and it nearly took him. I remember throwing seven or eight medicines at it and barely keeping him out of the hospital. His family was urging him toward more conventional care, and there were moments when I did not know if we were going to get him through. But he held on, his wife held on, and somehow we barely, barely got him through.
So when I remembered what he had told me—that from the beginning he believed God had said I was the man he was supposed to help—it landed with overwhelming force that maybe, just maybe, it was not only others I would need to help, but him as well.
Then I thought back to how I was introduced to the person who would become the co-writer of my first two books. At that time, I had been struggling to turn a mass of insights, research, outrage, and observations into a book on the ivermectin debacle. First, I engaged a New York Times bestselling author, someone who had followed the ivermectin story closely and had presented himself as someone who could help me write it. I worked with him for more than a year, only to discover that he was suffering from writer’s block and had produced essentially nothing of what he said he was producing. By then, I was adrift—with thousands of words written on Substack and a mountain of knowledge and experience. I knew what I wanted to say, but I did not yet have the skill to shape it into the kind of book it needed to be.
I wasn’t a writer. I was a doctor. And I was lost.
I had begun reaching out to other writers I had met along the way, hoping someone might be able or willing to help. Either they were busy with other projects or uninterested. Then, almost out of nowhere, someone who, unbeknownst to me, had just been contracted to write a few newsletters for my organization was suggested to me. So, I called her. In that first conversation, I sent her some of my writing, and she told me it was good enough and that I did not need a writer, only an editor. Then I sent her more. After reading the next section, she revised that view and said, in effect, no, this project needed more help than that.
The first chapter she sent me changed everything. I read it and immediately recognized that something essential had clicked into place. She had brought structure, clarity, force, and readability to material that had been living in me for years but that I had not yet been able to render on the page in the form it required. The voice was sharper, the argument cleaner, the movement more compelling. What emerged did not replace my thoughts; it gave them form. It became a vehicle for expressing what I had long known but could not yet fully deliver. And that became my first book, something I could not have created in that form on my own.
I saw that event in a new light. I had come to the edge of my own ability. I had reached a point where what needed to be brought into the world could not come through me alone. I had the knowledge. I had the urgency. I had the experience. But I did not yet have the means to carry it as far and as clearly as it needed to go. And then, when I thought the whole thing might be lost, the help required arrived.
Not just someone competent, but someone able to do exactly what that work demanded. Someone who could take what I had and help shape it into something far stronger, clearer, and more effective than I could have made by myself.
That book was not a bestseller. It was censored, caricatured, propagandized against, and dismissed as fringe, radical, and untrustworthy. But I cannot count the number of people who told me they could not put it down, how much they loved it, how readable it was, and how powerfully it carried them through something they themselves had lived through in fear and confusion. I will carry that for the rest of my life.
I no longer saw that as some odd, serendipitous collision of timing and personalities. I saw it as one more example of a pattern I had begun to recognize in my life: when something necessary for the work I was doing was missing, it had an uncanny way of arriving.
I can also recall the first Zoom with my Scott, who at the time was the first NP we had hired, and from listening to his thoughts and ideas during that first meeting, I knew I needed him to accomplish what I was setting out to do. Within six months, we created a formal partnership and renamed the practice the Leading Edge Clinic. Looking back, I can see that meeting for what it was: the arrival of someone I would not merely work with but build with.
And then there was the memory of when I met my wife Lisa, one I have cherished ever since.
During Covid, I had attended many dozens of conferences, meetings, and speaking engagements. At one point I was invited to speak at a conference in Sweden. The FLCCC was still economically healthy then and was covering my travel, so I went, along with the usual band of dissidents—Ryan Cole, Robert Malone, Meryl Nass, Sasha Latypova, and others. The conference coordinator was a woman named Lisa, someone I knew only through email at that point.
Yet even before I had ever laid eyes on her, something about her emails and responses stood out to me. Over the years, countless people have reached out wanting podcasts, interviews, appearances, and statements. Most interactions were task-like, mundane, and uninteresting. Hers were not, but I couldn’t honestly tell you why at this point. It might have had something to do with her tone—professional, kind, calm, measured, and immediate. I just remember them striking me as unusually pleasant. I remember thinking, without knowing whether she was twenty or eighty and without caring, that she simply felt reasonable and right.
I arrived late to the conference. There was a speaker dinner that night in a castle outside Stockholm, dark winter, January, one of those settings that already feels slightly unreal. I walked into a large room full of people, thirty or so, scattered among tables, food laid out, conversations underway. And as I entered, one person looked up.
We locked eyes.
I soon learned that it was Lisa. What made that moment so strange is that, by then, although I had briefly strayed—I am not a saint—I had firmly recommitted to not engaging in that sort of energy with women at all. I was married. I was focused on my work. I had become very deliberate about not sending out emotional or flirtatious signals, not inviting them, not chasing them, not letting myself live in that world. And one thing I had certainly noticed throughout life is that attractive women do not usually lock eyes with men, certainly not in that way, and certainly do not hold it.
But she did.
We held each other’s gaze, to me, for an almost impossibly long time. Again, I did know it was Lisa. But it was a serious gaze, not a flirtatious one. It felt like a connection, but in the plainest sense. I did not know what it meant. I only knew that it was unlike anything I was used to. Later, when she walked over and introduced herself with a few others, and we began speaking, I remember immediately asking her, half joking and half sincere, “Why are you so nice? Are you like that to everyone?” I could not figure out why the interaction carried such unusual warmth, calm, and ease. It felt idiosyncratic and strangely charged, though not in the way that phrase usually means.
I did not interact with her the rest of the weekend, except for a last-day meeting with Meryl Nass that she attended. The weekend ended, and life moved on. I did not talk to her after that, and I also did not sit around thinking about her.
Three months later, my life had changed in ways that I will not unpack again, and I found myself at another conference in Europe, this time to give testimony in the European Parliament. She was there too. I saw her at the hotel, said hello, and nothing more came of it.
But the next day, during a press conference, something happened that I have never forgotten and still do not know how to explain.
I was sitting at a long table with perhaps five or six others, fielding questions from reporters and attendees. I remember feeling tired and, more than anything, wanting not to be called on. My colleagues were speaking. I was half listening, half waiting for it to be over. And then, suddenly, I felt something—warmth is the only word I have for it. A kind of pull. It drew my attention to a corner of the room, a corner I did not know she was sitting in.
And the feeling I had in that moment was unlike anything I had ever experienced in relation to a woman.
It was not lust. It was not sexual hunger. It was not conquest. It was not even romance in the ordinary sense. I am not saying I was blind to her beauty or unaware that she was attractive. I was. But that was not what was drawing me. It felt, as strange as this is to say, like a message: that woman is someone you need to be with; if you are with her, you will find happiness and joy.
I know how that sounds. I don’t care. I’m simply telling you what happened.
The gaze I turned toward her in that moment did not feel like the gaze I had ever turned toward an attractive woman before. It felt like connection, warmth, conjunction. Something much deeper and much cleaner than desire. And from that point forward, I could not stop thinking about her.
The rest of that day was strange. I had the unmistakable sense that we were both aware of each other’s presence in the building, almost circling the possibility of connection without quite making contact. There were too many people, too many obligations, too much movement. Nothing happened.
Later that night, after she had gone out with people she needed to be with and I had gone out with others, we crossed paths again in the lobby. Once more, I did nothing. I was older. I had a public profile. I was used to being seen as someone with influence or authority, while she seemed younger, more private, and outside those kinds of power dynamics. The last thing I wanted was to approach her in a way that felt like a powerful man leaning on status, age, or visibility to pursue a younger woman. If anything happened between us, I wanted it to happen simply, cleanly, and on equal footing.
So, I let her leave without saying anything. I went upstairs to my room and spent the next two hours thinking about whether to call her, text her, or do anything at all. I couldn’t do it. It felt wrong—like I would come across as some older man using status or presence to pull a younger woman toward him. That wasn’t what I wanted. I wasn’t trying to bring her to bed. I just wanted to talk to her, to follow the connection I felt we had made. But because it didn’t feel clean, I did nothing and went to sleep.
And the next morning, as I was leaving for the airport, a small communication occurred. I believe she texted me, though it may have been me who reached out first. It was something minor, almost forgettable. But that small opening led to months of conversation, and eventually to our meeting again. One of our favorite recurring topics was describing what had happened in the press conference.
The first time we connected was the last time we were unconnected.
Looking back on it now, especially in light of the other people and moments I had begun to see differently, I see that press conference moment as one in which something necessary entered my life with a force, clarity, and rightness I did not create and could not have predicted. I see it as part of a pattern I had begun, however reluctantly, to recognize.
It felt ordained.
That decisive and clarifying moment in the shower, and the days of reflection that followed, left me with a conviction I could no longer evade: that the shape of my life was not adequately explained by chance alone. Too many people had appeared at decisive moments. Too many necessary things had arrived exactly when they were needed. Too many turns in the road had opened just as the path ahead required them.
I do not say that as someone claiming certainty about God’s methods, nor as someone trying to cast himself as chosen or exceptional. I say it only as honestly as I can. I had begun to see my life differently. What I once took to be a series of random events now looked more like guidance.
I could no longer escape the feeling that I had been helped.
And that changed not only how I understand my past, but how I now stand in relation to God.*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
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